


Talking to the Rest of the World

by threedays



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Female Runner Five, Implied Awkward Sam Crush, Season/Series 01, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 03:50:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17036081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threedays/pseuds/threedays
Summary: “Oh, hey, Sam. Have you met Abel’s newest resident? We’re calling her Runner Five and a Half, for lack of a better name.” Maxine’s voice remains steady, but her eyes on Sam’s are pleading. *I don’t know what to do about this.*He thinks maybe she means the kitten and then he sees the tears dripping off Five’s chin onto the towel and he wonders how it took him so long to see it. Maybe because the brain sees what it expects to and if there’s one thing he has not expected to see, it’s Five crying openly in front of other people.





	Talking to the Rest of the World

**Author's Note:**

> I'm American and Google helped me make things British-er, which reassures me that there are some absolutely incorrect and absurd usages of words herein. Roll with it?

Six months in, they learn she can speak.

 

She gives them one word, and of course it’s a swear, and nobody is surprised because they’ve met her and they know her and even though she’s only ever said one word to them now, her attitude oozes off  her like the waves of heat off the cracked pavement of what used to be a major motorway. Sara Smith is in the eastbound lanes and Jody Marsh in the west, both traveling to the setting sun, dispatching zombies with the swing of machetes. Five is in the median, dodging crawlers, swinging her ax like she’s playing a game of whack-a-mole and winning. The wet squelch of dead flesh and half-digested brains splattering on an ax handle has become a thing they all pretend they don’t hear.

 

It grabs her from underneath the crash barrier and she drops the F-bomb and Sara Smith is on her like a shot. While Jody does triple-time knocking back the hoard, Sara smashes the head of the zombie into the ground in one, two quick smashes of her weapon.

 

“Did it break the skin?”

 

Five doesn’t seem inclined to speak again, but she falls back on her butt on the pavement, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the sweat-wicking fabric of a threadbare pair of running capris. It takes Sara’s steady hands atop her own trembling ones to wrest the fabric away from the bruised but unbroken skin of her calf.

 

“You’re all right,” Sara says. “It didn’t get you.” She remains matter of fact as ever, and although she can feel her heartbeat in her throat she would never let on to Runner Five.

 

“Okay?” Jody calls, a nervous tinge to her voice. Though shaken herself, Runner Five is quick to get to her feet and move back into position. Jody shouldn’t have to hold down the fort all alone.

 

It’s only later, walking three-abroad down the feeder lane to their destination, a small, abandoned-by-the-living town with a largely-untapped supply of practical survival gear stashed away in a military museum, that Sara cuts a gaze sideways at Five and comments, “Quite the vocabulary you’ve got there.”

 

Five smiles with just the corner of her lips and bumps Sara with her shoulder, but she doesn’t respond.

 

 

 

 

It’s nearly two months later when Sam first hears Five’s voice in his ear. He’s been guiding her through the hostile territory into which she’s stumbled trying to rescue, of all things, a _cat,_ nevermind his voice on comms begging her to get ahold of herself, to abandon the mission – both missions – to come home –

 

Sam knows Five is stubborn. It hadn’t taken him a week to figure that out when she first arrived. But today he is pretty certain that if she survives this ordeal, it will be to die at his hand. (Or, more likely, to get a firmly-worded lecture.) She has put herself at risk for a small scrap of fluff that Janine will never allow to stay in Abel anyway, not without a way to earn its keep.

 

The hoard descends without warning, shoppers and employees from the string of stores now marked by broken window glass and dusty mannequin torsos blending with the zombie parts, fading signs still boasting a Sale On All Items for Her. Sam talks quick and urgent, coaching her through the danger, half out of his seat with his muscles as tense as if he is right there with her while she darts and dodges and defends herself.

 

He’s so caught up in their combined efforts that it takes him a moment to realize she’s stopped trying and is standing still as the dead – _more_ still than the dead, to be quite accurate – facing a zombie that is dragging toward her from a shattered Harrod’s storefront.

 

“Five, what are you doing? Get out of there. Run!”

 

But she doesn’t. Trainers frozen to the ground, weapon still mid-air from taking aim. Eyes locked on a gray face moving toward her through the sunny afternoon.

 

“ _Five!”_ Sam pleads. “You have to get out of there! Now! Run!”

 

He doesn’t expect an answer, and when her voice comes through his comms, it takes a second to place what she’s saying.

 

“Ariel?”

 

Sam’s heart pounds three times for the space of every normal heartbeat, and all the moisture disappears from his mouth and reappears in the palms of his hands. His entire job depends on runners listening to him and here’s Five – _Five!_ – talking and not listening. He’s going to watch her die. Oh, God, he’s going to watch her die!

 

The zombie moves slow, but it moves and Five doesn’t. And then Simon is there, swinging into the scene with a baseball bat and a world of swagger, and Sam goes limp with relief as Simon takes off the zombie’s head with one swing, pulling Five out of the way of its residue with the other hand.

 

He expects a reaction, having put together by now that the dead thing in front of her was wearing a face she recognized. It happens sometimes and it never gets any easier to watch. Runners losing their minds in the face of zombies who were once their spouses, children, friends …

 

But Five turns on a heel. As if nothing ever happened, she scoops up the kitten and leads the way, past Simon, toward the gates and home.

 

 

 

 

When she doesn’t turn up at dinner, her friends decide she’s tired and preoccupied with the kitten.

 

When she doesn’t turn up at breakfast, her friends get uneasy.

 

When she doesn’t turn up for her scheduled run, Sam bolts from the comms shack as if he’s been lit on fire. Urgent. Five skipping meals is nothing new, but Five skipping runs is an emergency.

He doesn’t find her in the bunk rooms, the rec room or even the running track. He doesn’t find her in Janine’s farmhouse or the mess tent and he almost doesn’t think to check with Maxine at the hospital tent, but then he does.

 

“ … twice a day,” Maxine is saying in that maddeningly reasonable voice she’s got when a patient is being incorrigible. “Only a little bit. Crush it into her food. She’ll be right as rain in no time.”

 

As he rounds the tent flap, Sam is surprised to see Maxine and Five seated side by side on the exam table, the cat cradled in the curve of five’s elbow with a towel wrapped around its body to keep the claws from reaching her, the doctor leaning over to administer medicine.

 

Food is one thing, but medicine quite another. Janine is going to poof into nonexistence with displeasure if she finds out medical supplies are being wasted on a _cat._ Sam is just about to say as much when he notices Five’s hands, stroking the kitten, are not quite rhythmic, as if she’s having to think about every movement, every stroke.

 

“Hello,” he says, alerting them to his presence, but only Maxine looks up.

 

“Oh, hey, Sam. Have you met Abel’s newest resident? We’re calling her Runner Five and a Half, for lack of a better name.” Maxine’s voice remains steady, but her eyes on Sam’s are pleading. _I don’t know what to do about this._

 

He thinks maybe she means the kitten and then he sees the tears dripping off Five’s chin onto the towel and he wonders how it took him so long to see it. Maybe because the brain sees what it expects to and if there’s one thing he has not expected to see, it’s Five crying openly in front of other people.

 

“Well, hello, there, little Five and a Half,” Sam says nervously. “Does Janine know? Not that I’m going to tell her. Not that I’m suggesting you tell her, either, because she’s going to be … well, moody. At the very least. And by moody, I mean ‘put us all on scut duty for a month or possibly kick us out of Abel.’ Time will tell. Hello, there little fella. Can I pet your little head? Let me just – OW! It bit me!”

 

Through the tears, a muffled laugh.

 

And then Five meets his gaze, all sad smiles and coursing tears and snot dripping off her chin and blotchy skin that speaks of great upset, and she tips forward from her seat and comes to rest against his shoulder, the kitten between them.

 

Sam allows his arms to encircle her. Maxine busies herself with sterilizing the equipment that’s touched the kitten. For long moments, there’s no sound except loud purring and soft sniffling and the clanking noises of Maxine’s work.

 

Then Five says, “My sister died.” 

 

The words are so simple that his heart breaks for her. She doesn't speak of rotting flesh and empty eyes and gruesome moans. She doesn't speak of watching her sister's dead flesh splatter as Simon wielded his weapon. She only says those three simple words. _My sister died._ Like it could have been natural causes instead of the most unnatural cause there could be. Her voice breaks on the last phoneme. She doesn’t say anything else for six weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

Green Bean is chasing dandelion fluff, as if this isn’t the zombie apocalypse.

 

Green Bean, that’s the cat. She started out as Runner Five and a Half, but then Maxine nicknamed her Half Runner – “used to sit on the porch with my grandmother, snapping off the ends, they always made the best side with Granny’s mashed potatoes and meatloaf, man, what I wouldn’t give …” -- and from there, she became Green Bean. Or Beanie. Or BB-cat. Surprisingly, Janine hasn’t sent the kitten packing (not that kittens pack, of course, Sam can just imagine them with their little suitcases stuffed with mouse-shaped tuna treats and crinkly paper bobbles). When asked about it, Janine says, very simply, “The cat has a job.”

 

It doesn’t take anyone very long to figure out that the cat’s job is to keep Runner Five healthy.

 

She hasn’t been right since the day she saved the kitten. Oh, she’s done fine on runs. Better than fine. Spectacular. A right zombie-killing machine, most days. It doesn’t show on runs. It shows at meal times, when she eats only the protein and only then what she can get away with, when a lot of days she doesn’t bother turning up at all. It shows at night, when runners at the very least, and everyone ideally, should be resting. But glimpse outside when you’ve gotten up for a drink or a security check in the night and you’ll find Five, running the track or tending the garden or mending the fences like it is two in the afternoon, not two in the morning, the kitten at her heels. The damn thing follows her like a puppy.

 

And because even stubborn, traumatized runners succumb to lack of calories and the disproportionate expenditure thereof, Sam finds her asleep in the oddest of places come daylight. This morning she’s on the steps to the farmhouse, one leg braced on the next step down and the other sticking off into the grass, head back and mouth open slightly. The kitten is chasing dandelion fluff, but when it sees Sam, it hops up onto Runner Five and nestles into the space between her ear and her shoulder. He can hear it start purring from several feet away. It always purrs when it’s in contact with Five.

 

He definitely doesn’t think, _I can’t blame it,_ because that would be embarrassing.

 

While he’s still a touch flustered from his wandering thoughts, Runner Five opens her eyes. His worry for her since her disastrous run has been a wave. It ebbs and then it washes over him, disappearing all the other things on his mind. His worry increases when their eyes meet and hers fill with slow, tired, overwhelmed tears.

 

“I don’t know how to be okay,” she says.

 

He ascends the steps slowly and sits one beneath her, leans his head over into her elbow, and reaches up to pet the kitten.

 

“Nobody said you have to be okay,” he tells her.

 

He feels her body tense, and then relax, as if she hadn’t thought of it this way before. What a relief it must be, he thinks, to stop worrying for a moment about looking, feeling, acting okay, and to just feel what she’s feeling.

 

“I only ever talked to Ariel,” she says. “She talked to the rest of the world.”

 

There’s a story there, he thinks, but it isn’t his and this definitely isn’t the time.

 

“I know how she feels,” Sam says. “Literally my job, you know. Talking to the rest of the world.”

 

“I know,” she says, and leans down to plop the most exhausted, honest kiss on top of his head. “That’s why I love you.”

 

She’s halfway across the yard with the kitten on her heels, leaving him dumfounded on the steps, before she turns to add, “Well, that and your puns. Love a pun.”

 

Then she’s off, Half Runner hopping behind her, sun rising on a fresh morning.

 


End file.
